When a Fox News personality in 2014 asked viewers whether they were on “Team Cliven Bundy or Team Federal Government,” it was obviously a loaded question. On one side — at least in Fox’s depiction — was a Nevada rancher and his ragtag band of patriots, and on the other was a faceless behemoth intent on seizing his cattle.

If you got your news elsewhere, though, you might have decided that the Bundys and friends were scofflaws and deadbeats who went dangerously off the rails when they led the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Oregon, in 2016. Or maybe those events are just a blur of Western weirdness to you — as they were to me before I read John Temple’s new book, “Up in Arms: How the Bundy Family Hijacked Public Lands, Outfoxed the Federal Government, and Ignited America’s Patriot Militia Movement.”

Now that I have, Fox’s question seems like a toss-up.

In his fourth book, Mr. Temple brings an Eastern sensibility to the quintessentially Western tale of the Bundys. Now a journalism professor at West Virginia University, he previously taught creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh and was at one time a reporter for the Tribune-Review. His previous books chronicled the roots of the opioid epidemic, lawyers who defend death row inmates and the work of coroners.

“Up in Arms” tells us that the Bundy saga has roots that run back before the Civil War. Still today many ranchers — notably including Mormons like the Bundys — view the West as their birthright, while legally the federal government owns 47% of the land from the Rockies to the Pacific (versus 4% of the land east of the Mississippi). Rancher rebellions over federal grazing fees worsen when D.C. adds environmental rules.

“Up in Arms” is about place as much as people, and Mr. Temple paints the landscape of southern Nevada. “The reddish gravel underfoot is actually a spectrum of hues: blues, roses, oranges, olives. The vegetation is equally varied: indigo bush, Nevada jointfir, buckhorn cholla, beavertail, Arizona cottontop, barrel cactus, desert trumpet, desert globemallow, Mormon tea. At daybreak and twilight, the air glows. And the desert’s immense hush is its own sound.”

The hush was shattered in 2014, when the federal Bureau of Land Management decided to do something about Cliven Bundy. For decades he had refused to pay grazing fees and ignored commands to pull his hundreds of cattle back on to his own land during the spring breeding season of an endangered tortoise. So the bureau decided to collect his cattle and sell them.

Mr. Bundy put the word out that he’d concluded that the federal government had no constitutional right to own the range, and the ideological battle lines were drawn.

The Bundys got in the way of the roundup, and the feds arrested one of the Bundy sons, then shocked another (Ammon) with a Taser, in a scene that went viral. A mix of militia types and oddballs flocked to the desert, where they faced down the feds (in some cases, pointing guns at BLM agents) and freed the captured cattle.

Team Bundy was wildfire.

“Cliven looked like everything American, or at least everything a particular slice of the populace remembered as good and right about this country, and those hearts thrilled to the notion that someone was finally standing up to the beast, and that the someone was not some blogger or politician but an honest-to-goodness rancher,” writes Mr. Temple.

Around here, we love tales of the Whiskey Rebellion. But it’s hard to get too fired up about Ammon Bundy’s next move: In 2016, he and a few dozen of his family’s newfound allies headed north and seized a nature reserve in an effort to force the federal government to reverse the prison sentence of two other ranchers.

If that move nudges you back toward Team Fed, just wait until the resulting trials on charges including conspiracy to impede federal officers. Only then does the reader learn the full extent of the federal response, which included indiscriminate use of informants, FBI creation of a fake documentary film crew, alleged obfuscation surrounding the fatal shooting by law enforcement of one Bundy ally, and attempts to withhold damning internal reports from the defendants. After 700 days in jail awaiting two trials, Cliven Bundy walked out a free man, as did other compatriots and family members.

“At that moment, Bundy Ranch was beautiful,” Mr. Temple writes. “Bundy Ranch was freedom.”

But was the Bundy affair a blow for freedom or a step toward deeper fragmentation in our troubled society? Mr. Temple doesn’t entirely satisfy the reader’s curiosity for his views on the deeper meaning of the standoff. He does, however, give the reader the information needed to decide whether he or she belongs on Team Bundy or Team Fed — or neither.

Rich Lord: rlord@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1542 or Twitter @richelord.

First Published: July 21, 2019, 2:00 p.m.